Selling a home in the United States has always carried an unquestionable fixed cost: the real estate commission. We have usually had to pay between 5% and 6% of the final sale price of the property to the real estate agency.
However, this historical standard has been completely broken. Not only is the US real estate market in legal crisis, but there has been a wave of class action lawsuits at the national level, with major companies and industry associations being accused of illegal practices typical of a monopoly.
What is an antitrust lawsuit?
A class action lawsuit is a mechanism that allows a large number of people with similar complaints to join forces to sue a corporation. In this case, thousands of home sellers who had to pay inflated commissions have joined forces against the giants of the sector.
The litigation focuses on the violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is the federal law that guarantees free competition. In addition, this law specifically prohibits agreements between competitors that restrict trade or lead to price fixing. It has been an open secret that real estate commissions have been at overly competitive levels for decades.
Cooperative compensation or real estate companies
The complaint is not against commissions themselves, but against the mechanism that made them mandatory and non-negotiable in contracts. Historically, the National Association of Realtors established this as a fundamental law. This rule required that, when listing a home, the selling broker had to make a compensation offer to the buying broker. Standard practice dictated that this compensation be around 2.5% to 3% of the sale price.
The result? The seller of the house ended up paying both their own agent and the agent representing the buyer.
This significantly inflated the total cost of the transaction for the seller. This is why the plaintiffs argued that this constituted implicit price fixing. Although the percentages were theoretically negotiable, standard practice kept the buyer’s share close to 3%, creating an artificial floor price.
In addition, this created an incentive for the real estate agents themselves; they ended up showing or promoting properties that offered higher commissions, rather than showing homes with lower or no compensation offers to potential clients. In the end, the buyer, the person who received the service from the agents, was not even the one who negotiated and paid that amount directly. It was a hidden cost in the sale price of the house, financed by the seller.
The $42 million case
William Raveis, Howard Hanna, EXIT, Windermere, Lyon, Charles Rutenberg, My Home, Tierra Antigua, and West USA are some of the real estate companies that have decided to reach an agreement with the plaintiffs and have chosen not to go to trial. Between them, the agreement amounts to $42.7 million. Eligible consumers are those who sold a home between 2017 and 2025 and paid a commission to a real estate broker. If you are one of those people in that situation, the deadline to claim is December 30, 2025. The Final Approval Hearing for this group of defendants is scheduled for February 5, 2026. Go find a good lawyer, just in case!
The catalyst for this entire reform was not a settlement, but a guilty verdict: we are referring to the case known as Sitzer/Burnett in Missouri, which went to trial in October 2023. The jury found the NAR, HomeServices of America, and Keller Williams guilty of conspiracy.
All of this time of class action lawsuits and changes in NAR rules at the end of the monopolistic real estate business model that has ruled the United States for more than 30 years. From now on, there will still be commissions (lower ones), but at least transparency will reign, which has been quite absent in this type of sector for too long.